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Dessert

Wafer Puddings

A baked dessert made with butter, flour, cream, eggs, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Wafer Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Mix in the flour, cream, and egg yolks until smooth.

Fill and top

  1. Butter some patty pans and half-fill them with the batter.

  2. Whisk the egg whites to a firm froth and cover the batter with them.

  3. Sprinkle powdered sugar on top.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400 °F (200 °C) for 15 minutes.

  2. Turn the puddings onto a hot napkin and serve with jam or sweet sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the batter and adds richness and flavour to the puddings.
Flour
Gives the batter body so the puddings hold their shape when baked.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter into a smooth mixture.
Egg whites
Whisked to a froth, they lighten the top and help the puddings rise.

The step that matters

Whisking the egg whites to a firm froth. Egg whites trap air when whisked, and that air expands in the oven to lift the puddings. If they are under-whipped, the froth collapses and the puddings stay dense.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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